Brown v. Board of Education: A South African Perspective

South African liberals had a field day in attacking the evidently
stone-deaf neo-Nazi apartheid regime from the position of the moral
high ground. Left-wing opponents of the regime, such as the members
of the TLSA, had a more ambivalent position since in their view, slanted
by both a class struggle as well as an anti-Western angle of vision, it
was always advisable to examine carefully any gifts borne by the ruling
class of the United States. Even though we were stridently anti-Stalinist
and consistently critical of the authoritarian and tyrannical rule of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union, we were even more ardently
and implacably opposed to the enticements of what to us was the
imperialism of the West. In reflecting on the dynamics of that period,
I find that we were decidedly myopic in not making much more of the
political propaganda value of the Court’s judgement.

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Neville AlexanderPRAESA Project for the Study of Alternative Education in South Africa, University of Cape TownE-mail AuthorNEVILLE ALEXANDER is director of the PRAESA Project for the Study of Alternative Education in South Africa at the University of Cape Town.